July 19, Detroit News: She represented Kilpatrick in his last stand — a brief trial run by Gov. Jennifer Granholm that ended with him resigning. McPhail says Kilpatrick's other lawyers shouldn't have let him agree to $1 million in restitution, just as they shouldn't have let him claim he had only $6 a month after expenses. But she can't bring herself to blame him: To her, he's still a somewhat endearing, sympathetic figure.

"He really didn't get it. In his world, the things he did were OK. The rest of us know that potential disasters were lurking, but he just didn't believe it." His were failures of judgment, she says, not signs of evil or malice.

When all options were exhausted and Kilpatrick realized the text messages would appear in print, he was devastated. "I had never seen a more broken spirit. All he did was apologize and say how sorry he was."

So many things…

First, she can’t blame Kilpatrick for agreeing to the restitution? He is an adult, right? He was born in 1970, not July 18, 2011. He served in elected office and was responsible for multi-billion dollar budgets or am I just imagining that happened?

Kilpatrick is also a law school grad, not some rustic everyman unfamiliar with the bright lights and loud noises of a courtroom. Hells bells, the dullest of laymen understands agreeing to a million dollar restitution means the prosecutors are going to expect you to pay it. Especially if you’re living in a mcmansion and making six-figures as Covisint’s answer to Shelly Levine.

McPhail’s distinction between malice and a failure of judgment is absurd on its face. A drunk driver who falls asleep at the wheel and plows into a busload of nuns and orphans isn’t malicious, but that doesn’t mean he isn't legally culpable for his actions. If the best defense Kilpatrick apparatchiks can muster is that he was just criminally negligent, well, that speaks for itself.

As for Kilpatrick’s supposed many apologies, let’s go to the man himself. Kilpatrick, under oath, earlier this year: “I certainly believe that telling the truth right there would have saved my own butt and would have saved a lot of turmoil and trouble, but I don't know if I would have done anything any different, because I was trying to stand up for my wife and children at that time.”

If you were to chart contrition on a horizontal scale between one and ten—one meaning not contrite at all and ten signifying a level of penitence unseen since Mary Magdelene—Kilpatrick’s own words indicate he rates a score slightly to the left of the theoretical value of absolute zero.